LADYBUG MEAT

bloomed, I thought of

the wingless beetle,

How it had chosen

a scene of white

and pink and pollen

1. Pleated Inkcap

2. Candlesnuff

3. Jelly Ears

4. Common Bonnet

5. Shaggy Parasol

6. Crystal Brain

7. Stinkhorn

8. Frosted Spiderweb

THE PARDONER’S TALE

I remember the tough buttons on mobile phones that, like unripe fruit, fought to be pressed.

I remember good drink and how it licked my tonsils and stuck in my throat like hot glue.

I remember hands that would tremble like the wings on a moth.

I remember the passing coffin with its gauze of white chiffon you could see right through.

I remember the exact moment Dave turned to me and said I wasn’t drunk or dreaming.

I remember the exact moment Death looked like my sleeping body.

I remember that once I sat up, Dave said that it would be after him or I sooner or later.

I remember that someone or other once said ‘I intend to live forever or die trying.’

I remember, in a churchyard a mile from here, a broad oak tree along from where the suited-boys lunched.

I remember there was a day, stood at its foot, I found a bushel of pound coins.

I remember finding it wholly enchanting how its trunk made a hollow to rest my head.

I remember Dave insisted that I pick up a six-pack of K-ciders and two Cornish pasties.

I remember that the day’s light was stiflingly blue with potential.

I remember the jangle of coins would send me to choke on my own breath.

I remember Dave insisted I leave quickish.

I remember he had a strange look in his eyes.

I remember that I didn’t like the way he kept counting the coins and then counting them again.

I remember the tinny muzak in the off-licence and how it made me do a terrible thing.

I remember the opaque bottle of cough syrup and how the brown liquid mixed seamlessly with cider.

I remember that someone or other once said ‘I intend to live forever or die trying.’

I remember that I approached him with no guilt, only joy.

I remember that Death moved faster than I had anticipated.

I remember the white blade of Dave’s knife and how it sunk into my stomach as if it were warm cake.

I remember how the open cider washed through the open wound.

I remember that Dave was Death and Dave was Avarice.

I remember you should dial 999 for an ambulance.

I remember the tough buttons on mobile phones that, like unripe fruit, fought to be pressed.

[Through emulating the form of Joe Brainard’s ‘I Remember’, there is the effect of Janus - The ancient Roman God who summons both past and present. Segueing between desire, regret, and anecdote, the speaker’s voice is panoptic. The Pardoner’s Tale depicts ‘The Three Rioters’ who decide to find Death and slay him. This fictive tale of glutton is overlayed with the drunken meditations of those pictured.]

THE PLIGHT OF THE PARSON

Finns Black is 630 years old today. His speech has the same delay as the street’s pipes. There was a patina of age that kept his thoughts private for a good moment after one expected him to speak. And when he did, a person would often make their excuses to catch the first bus. Pulling the chaser of Cherry Wine from his lips, Finns Black restrung the four folds in his brow. His words were simple. Jesus was the only way. It was a fine rhetoric - fully complete, a constrictor knot.

Out in the street, young crowds jeered when Finns Black passed. He took refuge in a narrow cafe where people were too busy eating slim sausage stew to see what he saw. The waitress looked upon him kindly. She pulled his bike inside and parked it in the cloakroom. ‘Are you interested in giving your life to Christ?’ Finns Black touched her arm before she could leave his table. The woman handed Finns Black a cigarette and a lighter. ‘You don’t have to pretend Finns. I have a pack for you upstairs in my locker. Wait around later and I’ll get you them.’

Finns Black watched the heavy blonde waitress pull the cafe shutters shut. Walking towards him, she held out the blue striped Benson and Hedges. ‘You do know that you won’t reach the Celestial City if you don’t give yourself to Christ…’ Finns Black lit a cigarette. The woman looked at him and smiled.

RESIDENT TRANSIENT

And forth we riden, a litel more than pas,

Un-to the watering of seint Thomas.

                             — Geoffrey Chaucer

In 1392, Old Kent Road had windmills. The dusty thoroughfare, paved by the Romans, crossed vast swathes of green pasture. In ‘the watering of seint Thomas’, a pub that stands unoccupied today, Geoffrey Chaucer’s thirty-one pilgrims assembled. Whilst their horses drank from a small stream, the men ordered  half-pints and spoke of their impending expedition. Upon the setting of the sun, the pilgrims would arrive in Canterbury. Kneeling before the shrine of the murdered Saint Thomas Becket, the pilgrims would seek spiritual guidance. The gilded tomb held a piece of the martyr’s vestment and a fragment of finger bone.

PREMISE :

Amongst Chaucer’s clan are impoverished monks, gallant knights, foolhardy drunks, disillusioned workmen, a reticent lawyer, a cook afflicted with a chancre sore, sexual deviants, crude wives, curators and sufferers of love triangles, crinkle-cut-haired brown-nosers, and more. Along the pilgrimage, speakers surface and retire. Sometimes tales converge and grate. Though on large, Chaucer’s string of pithy and didactic vignettes promote a chivalrous and honest temperament. Above all religion, class constraints, and conflicts, Chaucer foregrounds compassion.

Along my travels of Old Kent Road, I encountered transients of various dispositions. Unbeknownst to today’s itinerants, Chaucer immortalised their predecessors and The Kent Road as a celebrated site of flux. Nick Dunn describes an environment’s past to echo through its future shape. ‘The difference lies in their restless ability to meld together. As such, we find ourselves consistently presented with the ‘new’, but it is typically anything but, concocted as it is from earlier eras albeit in variegated forms.’ I intend to align Chaucer's voices with those I have heard. Through overlaying their stories, one can harness a fuller psychogeography. I will meld Situationist practice, Old English, and verbatim.

THE REEVE’S TALE

10:35

As I walked away, I opened my gallery to review the photos. I dragged my finger across the screen and rested it there until inactivity sent my phone to sleep. Collins was not a celebrity. Though there was something in his blunted character and tech treasure house that demanded attention - demanded spectacle. Nevertheless, what did this spectacle achieve? What did it enunciate? Within The Spectacle of Disintegration, McKenzie Wark describes the middle-class as ‘heroes’ of the spectacle - a bourgeoisie ‘angling for a way to exploit its edges.’ Wark describes the ‘power of the middle class over the proletariat’ to stem from a ‘distance from the popular, and its possession of the power to mark that very distance.’ I felt a discomfort in subsuming the position of a ‘petit bourgeouis aficionado’ - a figure who maintains their ‘illusory class’ through characterising ‘those below [her], or at least certain images of their life.’ There was something distasteful, perhaps even aggressive, in how I had pointed my camera into Collin’s private space. I had not been the first. He had anticipated my intentions. He had put his morning’s work aside, stepped out into the weather, and watched me focus my lens. When I left with what I wanted, the warmth of his seat would have diminished.

10:42

SE - SPECTACLE IN THE STYLE OF ZADIE SMITH

Out in the street, there are four hundred onions. The piled trolley remains parked on a double-red line until dark. On Old Kent Road, no object belongs to anyone. Horned melons prick soft hands. An iPhone is dismembered and sold in parts. Last week’s story of a house-fire is put out. A FOR SALE sign is wedged between the brick. Below the charred windows is the acrylic restaurant CALABAR ZONE. The name tempts a narrative. If ingested, the dark Calabar seed acts in effect like nerve gas, ultimately causing death by asphyxiation. Curtain rags drape from the black sills. Possession and witchcraft. Connections beget more connections.

As I pass between shops, exhaust cooks on the wet of my coat. I am in love with a single beautiful thing. And then its multitudes. The all-you-can eat window displays. The limitless shades of squeezable purple plastic. Shea Butter, Milk of Mint Face Scrub, Papaya-Nut Whitening Lotion, Lemonvate Toe Cream. I touch the smooth canister of Behrain Pearl Air Freshener. How it holds its warmth, how it feigns coolness. I could buy sixteen and still have change from a ten pound note. The Arabic script pleads to be read like braille but I imagine it feels like silk.

Along the estate, clothes-lines sag between balconies. The breast of a Wood Pigeon slaps through a hoodie sleeve, leaving a pellet of white dragged down the fabric. A woman on the sixth floor hollers at the bird. Fuck off. Fucking flying rat. Yeah. that’s it, Fuck off. Silver sandal in hand. Marlboro in mouth. The bird settles on the car-park shelf. It waits for the crows to finish. It swoops down to sample Saturday night’s nightclub vomit.

A young girl lies in the centre of the roundabout. For two decades, I walked the grassy junction she lay on. On the left hand side there is a sculpture I hate. A town of model homes that never quite reached anyone’s knees. A white lorry pulls into the ditch and its doors open. The bodies of cattle slowly descend on a crane. Men in white overalls gather, wipe blood into their paunches, and look up. This is the first time the girl has seen a cow. It is not black and white with demure eyelashes. It is just another of the city’s dead things.

OLD KENT ROAD:

MONOPOLY'S DUD SQUARE

Old Kent Road : Monopoly's dud square. The cheapest and only property south of the river. At Bricklayer’s Arms, I alight with the crowd and pause in the shadow of the orbital. Here, pavement breeds new pavement. Slabs of grey-green asphalt spill out like wet turbot skins - complete with chewing-gum tubercles. Like a noose, the elevated motorway pushes people out. Tesco bags blow against the perimeter. A sour blue-raspberry condom licks my heel.

10:27

I plan my zigzagged passage across the pedestrian islands. If you are to inhabit the city, you learn to perfect your dance with death. I make it to Island B before the black Honda turns left. I fast-walk to Island C. I pull down my hood and reply to a text. By an inch, I miss the side view mirror of an articulated lorry. I breathe out: Ellipsis. Michel de Certeau would read these maneuvers as a prosody poem. Under the traffic’s imposing rhyme scheme, I intercept and interrupt. ‘Asyndeton cuts out: it undoes continuity and undercuts its plausibility.’ My walk is constituted of  footstepped stutters - Deletions. I dart between cars - Slash. I mount the pavement- Hyphen. I write a text of ‘enlarged singularities and separate islands.’ My rhetoric is hinged on spatial elements, street furniture, and their references. I weave between bollards and cat’s eyes. I scamper between the lights of the cars - two streams, red and gold.

10:29

A pair of Nike Jordans straggle from a power line. I interpret this as a hanging - a gibbeting. Walking is forbidden here. I use the adverb ‘here’ because how else does one condense this terrain? This junction of stifled oxygen. This junction of cars that hurl as if launched from the barrel of a gun. Between traffic, I hear the electricity hum through the power lines and across the white sky. Whilst there isn’t the soil to grow a weed, red roses repeatedly appear at the railings. A photograph of a young boy. A note: ‘Jimmy, we miss you. I should have held your hand.’

10:31

My feet sidle at the entrance. Somewhere in the depths of the corridor, a man sits like a large toad. His craned shoulders are framed by a ravine of dismembered circuit boards, computer carcasses, and hard drives. The narrow inlet is thick with the warm olfactory of plastic and solder. He looks up from his work and calls out to me.

‘If you want to take my picture, you can leave.’ His eyes hang through thick rimmed glasses.

I push my phone down into the side of my leg and come clean.

‘I did want to take a photo but you wouldn’t need to be in it …’

He sighs, puts the laptop down, and begins to inch through the clutter.

‘What is it about this place that you people like? I’m not a celebrity.’ He smiles and kicks a small satellite dish from the doorway. It spins and cracks on the last step.

I collect the pieces and hand them to him.

The first of the preceding images is a collage of the Franco Manca floor-plan and a Paul-Henri Chombart de Lauwe style plotting of my movements within the span of a week. The plotting displays a whirring triangular circuit between front desk, bar, and kitchen porter. I have taken aesthetic properties from Wyndham Lewis’ BLAST: War Number in order to convey the narrow and mechanical quality of my traversing. With no deviations, only iterations, my activity stands in stark contrast to the whimsical premise of the Dérive. The hand of the Vorticist opposes sentimentality. The serrated edges of the woodcut are designed with sheer violence. Lewis desires to convey an exact quiddity of the modern world. The Vorticist does not pursue simulacra, only aggressive substantiality.

To some degree, the restaurant emulates battle. The serving hatch defines two separate spheres: Front of house and Back of house. The two parties are kept in a state of near conflict. When carrying the collage to photograph at an upstairs window, the pieces reconfigured to form alternative compositions. The two latter images depict the collage’s resultant organisations. Without manipulating the shapes myself, the collage reverted to a vortex.

20:07

PROVOCATION PIZZA : BIN BAG BANALITY

FORMULARY IN THE SPIRIT OF IVAN CHTCHEGLOV

Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Sanitation Celebrations: Grand Finale of the First NYC Art Parade, Part I: The Social Mirror, 1983, garbage collection truck.

I tie the bags, carry them out into the rain, and drop them at the curb. ‘Presented with the alternative of love or a garbage disposal unit, young people of all countries have chosen the garbage disposal unit.’ Whilst maintenance is a fundamental fixture of Capitalism, it is a facet carefully concealed. This heaped street-side installation only appears at night - only at closed-doors.

One Autumn night when the collection truck didn’t show and foxes chewed through the bin bags, the morning’s passersby were enraged. They stopped at the curb, looked down into the spilled contents of chewed crusts and beer bottles, and went online to write their martyred diatribes. Faced with the messy by-product of consumerism, the people responded with pointed fingers. They recognised their reflection in Franco Manca’s glass front but not in the littered gutter.

If a new pizzeria were to be formulated, one might forefront and hijack the establishment’s hidden maintenance and service work. In Chtcheglov’s sardonic tone, I might announce the appointment of a new management team. Staff would no longer serve under the elusive figure of Franco but instead the transparent moniker Frankie - Manky Frankie. Inside the restaurant, entropy would reign supreme. Fungi would grow in thick shelves from the walls but also the tables, stairs, and utensils. Bouts of watercress, spinach, and peas would grow in deep-set, water-logged motes running along each wall.

The menu would solely list produce cultivated and foraged within the restaurant. Neighbourhood rodents must be caught and carved if a customer has a preference for meat. A single septic tank and a simple hydroponic system would keep all nature in balance. The menu would move with the seasons. In winter, the interior’s crop might entirely perish. This would reintroduce the acumen of the hunter-gatherer, a ‘forgotten desire’. Everybody pitches in, society thrives. Customers would no longer sit down to their private dinnertime spectacles but would engage in a situation of invigorating, albeit nauseous, uncertainty.  

Artist Zeger Reyers engages in a near identical form of Situationism. With a desire to humanise the domestic sphere, Rayers planted mycelium within everyday objects. The mushrooms were then prepared and served during the exhibition finissage. Through consuming from the furniture, the objects were reestablished as secondary - as tools and accessories. The furniture became wood, glue, and damp again - No longer confined to the trappings of a feminine realm.

19:02

On my fifteen minute break, I scroll Instagram. Out in the street, London weather resumes unbeknownst to the slice of Naples sunshine.

The pizza life always chooses me. The pizza life always chooses me.

The 'practical power of modern society detach[es] itself and build[s] an independent empire’ This Instagram spectacle, or ‘The pizza life’, is an institution in and of itself. As a waitress, it is a portrait I am designedly estranged from. It acts as a room without windows - vacuum sealed and in contradiction with itself. Within Mythologies, Roland Barthes expounds on the essential deception at play within the representation of French cuisine. Barthes details how the celebrated Steak and Chips is preceded by an unpalatable history of French Capitalism and Algerian dispossession. In a similar vein, behind Franco Manca’s fluffy crust is a Brexit-exacerbated labour shortage, woeful employee retention rates, and the dubious curtailing of tips.

Through the medium of photography, this separation is heightened. The saturated foodstuff, luminous health in the consumer’s face, and background of warm hardwood is assembled to form a hyper-reality. 'The Photograph’s essence is to ratify what it represents.’ That particular night, its noise and movement, is hollowed through. The culinary world is rendered a visual space beyond the act of eating. Through a system of signs, the viewer receives: young, attractive woman falls victim to the allure of pizza from middle-class establishment. Situated within a swathe of historically underprivileged South London, the pizza chain satiates a customer’s social class. One can taste both Naples and North London in their visit. The restaurant is a self-contained microcosm of society and the community it serves. It is a comfort-food facsimile.

19:31

‘This impure Present our Vortex despises and ignores. For our Vortex is uncompromising. Our Vortex will not hear of anything but its disastrous polished dance. Our Vortex is white and abstract with its red-hot swiftness.’

— Wyndham Lewis

DO YOU WANT LIES WITH THAT?

When I tie on the red apron, I become mythos. Tonight, I am bolshie San Marzono tomato, a glug of chilli oil, the spilt blood in il tricolore. I propagate the superlative of redness: the necessity of Friday nights doused with deep-bodied wine and laughter. I am a servant to Guy Debord’s ‘simple image’. I am a waitress. I was invented to induce the ‘hypnotic behaviour’ of customers. I sell Italian holiday nostalgia on a London high-street. I sell Se telefonando at an ambient volume. I sell a dinner date Instagram post. I sell pizza.

17:59

I apply one last dab of lipstick in the bathroom mirror and stare into my t-shirt logo. The sketched oscillation of a ladle applying sauce contrives a sense of the infinite. The loose form is designed to inspire a consumer’s corporeal appetites: to eat, to dance, to live without inhibition. It is a perfectly spun simulacra. Nevertheless, when I look, I see only a vortex. It stares back as a poorly disguised adaption of Wyndham Lewis’ motif. It presents, in mechanics, the greatest efficiency - Industrialism’s unerring machine.  

From a point of stillness, the vortex ensues around me: The restless hand that uncorks the prosecco, the grating scream of a child, the UberEats delivery chime swept up in the unctuous breath of cured lamb. I stumble over my own foot. The bottle of Sanpelligrino spills out over my hands.

18:07

This business of flattened reality is as Debord describes, the ‘incessant refinement of the division of labour into a parcellisation of gestures’. The glassy spectacle of restaurant dining, the neat scribbled brand, ‘ultimately expresses nothing more than its desire to sleep.’ There is no exit from spectacle. I myself am its ‘guardian’. I offer to take the family photo for table 11. I add pen to the logo.

18:24

A child in a highchair knocks a pitcher of garlic oil from table 19. I cover the spill with flour. Flour permeates the restaurant. I wash it out of my hair before I sleep. It serves its semiotic purpose - life sustaining substance, domesticity, Naples under your feet. The oil clumps to form a paste. I scrape it up with a pie knife.

My manager surreptitiously draws my attention to a cluster of fungi growing from a damp corner. I use the knife to pull the roots out from the adjoining walls. ‘Wherever there is independent representation, the spectacle reconstitutes itself.’ 

18:26

‘I’ll have the Aubergine Parmigiana and Pizza Funghi e Salsiccia.’ The English gentleman draws out his vowels. He desires to simulate Italian musicality. A syllabic chain of brassy consonants set alight with unfamiliar suffixes. The result is an awkward series of staccato notes.

The poet’s images and word choice conjure a metropolitan entity producing a cascade of evanescent, subjective detail. There is the acute operation of detached, albeit delighted, perception and digression – as distinguished in the lens of the flâneur. One line’s suspended image bleeds into the next. At once, the ‘omnibus across the bridge’ continues its itinerant course into the slowed ‘crawl’ of  ‘a yellow butterfly’. Through superimposing a nature scene atop these urban movements, the city is engendered with an organic, almost sentient, force. This meditative effect is accelerated via the poem’s sonic quality. The enclosed rhyme, redolent of the Petrarchan sonnet, fuels this synergy of  images. There is a pleasure in the poem’s predictability, akin to man’s ostensible grasp over nature’s patterns. The indented rhyme ‘butterfly’ and ‘passer-by’ produces further unity through assonance, the double consonants generating the sounded effect of elevated incantation.

The articles of the poet’s attention share a fragility: The liminal, perhaps precarious, position on ‘the bridge’, the dragged ‘crawl’[ing] of the butterfly as if moving towards hibernation, and the single passer-by discerned as ‘a little restless midge.’ Living largely in the reader’s ear, the poem’s minutiae are particular yet fleeting - the images collapsing and transforming on being read. This gestures to the city’s allure: its dual invitation to be known yet never fully conceived.

Whilst the poem never particularises the heard, sound is repeatedly suggested.  Within the second stanza, the poet further utilises phonics to forge the city’s soundscape. The alliterative ‘big barges’ conjures the obstructive authority of the vehicle's horn. The ‘thick fog’ procures a soundless lethargy. The simile of the ‘silken scarf’ against the ‘shadowy wharf’ contrives the sinuous shape and sound of Thames water. Moreover, beyond this linguistic charm, there is a conflict in the behaviours of the poet’s chosen subjects. How, one asks, does a dark ‘wharf’ act as a ‘yellow silken scarf’? Or an ‘omnibus’ like a ‘yellow butterfly’? The comparisons jar in their far-fetched reach and perhaps better entertain the surreal. Whilst the ‘yellow’ articles search to personify the city’s movements, the reader is left only further estranged.

Through the poem’s fractures of dark and light, static and kinetic, the poet revels in the city’s curious and impenetrable character. This artistic rendering of the metropolis is most lucid in the poem’s final lines: ‘And at my feet the pale green Thames / Lies like a rod of rippled jade.’ Whilst the Thames is observed from an aerial view, the river’s ‘rod’[-like] uniformity is distorted through its oxymoron likening to ‘rippled jade’. The poem’s phenomena are assembled as if by the hand of a painter. The ‘yellow leaves’ merge with the suggested Thames blue to produce a striking compound. The poet’s use of simile, rather than metaphor, captures the condition of the city dweller - the speaker grappling with semblances rather than accuracy. Much like an artwork acts as a thinly veiled profile of its maker, the city subsumes the poet within its anatomy.

Enacting the flâneur's role of the street’s witness, the poet’s presence is only established within the final stanza. Preceding this appearance, the poem engages in passive voice. Whilst the poet harnesses an inward rhythm, the co-coordinating conjunction ‘And’ generates a stilted, see-sawing imbalance of stimuli. For example, the line: ‘Big barges of yellow hay are moored against the shadowy wharf’ lands emphasis on the object’s movement. The series of similes too, naturally employ a passive structure, drawing attention toward experience in place of an active subject. Thus, it can be inferred that the poet is not looking to wholly narrativise his surroundings but capture a quiddity of London through the exchange of volatile impressions.

On my first day of school, I bit the Woon twins. I was sent to stand by the wall with my back faced against the playground. A group of teachers gathered and spoke in fast, anxious tones.

“Children who bite other children-” Mrs Verhoeven began, her speech impeded by a murmuration of female voices.

“I had her for maths this morning… very quiet.” I could hear Miss Marwood’s glasses pressed into the tip of her nose.

I ran my fingers into the grooves between the bricks. When I had first looked up from Harry’s shoulder, there was no mark. And then all at once, there was a perfect indent. White water fountain. White nails. White indent. My entire smile on his arm -The two gaps in my milk teeth, my fangy canines, and my two front rabbits. George’s hand cleaved the empty space between his brother and my mouth. I had not wanted to bite him, nor had I planned to, but he had gotten in the way. His lips twitched as he held out his two fingers. His breathing was ragged. I didn’t look away. One, then two rings of indents, and blood.

“I’m sorry Grace. The parent complained.”

My mother took my hand from Miss Marwood’s and pulled me into the flap of her dark green coat. Kneeling down, she took the collars of my pinafore and smiled. She was wearing her make-up.

“I think it’s a McDonald’s kind of day, isn’t it?”

Miss Marwood’s expression stiffened. My mother straightened out her coat and nodded her goodbye.

‘...in case you missed it, we have an early parents evening coming up-’

Miss Marwood searched her pockets for the newsletter but my mother had already carried me away.

At home, I took the tissue from my book-bag and followed my mother into the kitchen. She had been singing this whole time and I wanted to sing with her. I placed it on the counter where I could still see it. She unfolded the squares and leant her tangled hair into the light. Now that I come to think of it, I notice that my mother’s appearance had always been made up in some regard. When she wasn’t wearing lipstick, she was wearing charcoal. When her hair was swooped into a formless mass, her finger-nails were immaculate.

The spider’s legs were craned inwards, its abdomen twisted outward from its pincers. With its legs flat, it would have been the size of my palm.

“I tried to stop them but they-”

My mother’s eyes narrowed. Once she was stood up she could see all of it. Taking tweezers from a ceramic bowl of salt water, she plucked the legs out one by one. She placed them vertically, wiping the head of the tweezers each time. They looked like dried cherry stems and splintered like matches.

“Harry stamped on it. He-He stomped on it.”

Taking its dappled brown abdomen up into the light, she turned it around and let it fall back onto the counter. She closed the tissue inwards. Her face seemed on the brink of crumpling into tears, tears that would pour down her closed lips in silence.

“I can get you another one. There are more, I saw them. ”

I tugged at her fleece arm but her whole body trembled. I expected her to say something in her defence, but she stood at the counter until my father’s keys sounded in the door.

“Go to your room, Edith.” Her voice had no weight to it, like feathers. It was neither sombre nor empty, as might be expected from someone who was unwell.